I Hate Men

by Pauline Harmange

I’ll admit it: I hate men. All of them, really? Yes, the whole lot of them. By default, I have very little respect for any of them. Which is funny actually, because ostensibly I don’t have any legitimacy when it comes to hating men. I chose to marry one, after all, and I have to admit that I’m still very fond of him.

Apart from the fact that it undermines our cause, it appears that misandry is also very difficult for men to deal with – an intolerable brutality that adds up to the shocking outrage of precisely zero deaths and zero casualties. Apparently, what with all this feminist bullshit, #MeToo and the rest of that crap, it’s very hard to be a man nowadays. They don’t know how to flirt any more, how to get in a lift with their female colleagues, how to crack a joke. What do they still have the right to do now?

If we all became misandrists, what a fabulous hue and cry we could raise. We’d realise (though it might be a bit sad at first) that we don’t actually need men. I believe too we might liberate an unsuspected power: that of being able to soar far above the male gaze and the dictates of men, to discover at last who we really are.

I think at this point it’s worth defining the concept of misandry as I employ it in this essay. I use the word misandry to mean a negative feeling towards the entirety of the male sex. This negative feeling might be understood as a spectrum that ranges from simple suspicion to outright loathing, and is generally expressed by an impatience towards men and a rejection of their presence in women’s spaces. And when I say ‘the male sex’ I mean all the cis men who have been socialised as such, and who enjoy their male privilege without ever calling it into question, or not enough (yes, misandry is a demanding and elitist concept).

It’s extraordinarily common for men who like to trumpet the fact that they are feminists to have failed to deconstruct their privilege as much as they’d like us to think, and to blithely take advantage of it to trample on and abuse the women in their lives.

I remember once explaining to my husband the principles of non-violent communication, hoping that it would offer us a way to express disagreement without immediately lapsing into a stormy argument. He could have read the book I bought too. Or he could even – what a mad idea! – have taken the initiative, acknowledged that we never manage to resolve our arguments satisfactorily, and come up with some kind of solution himself. But that’s never what happens. I’m the one who shoulders the entire emotional burden of the relationship. That’s what women do, because in a heterosexual relationship it’s always the woman who’s learned to do that.

It’s not always enough, progress can be heavy going, but it is worth it. I still reproach him for his habit of waiting for me to offer up my pre-digested concepts and reflections about masculinity, rather than deconstructing his own as much as he can; and for the way he interrupts me, can’t bear to be wrong, and doesn’t make more of an effort to listen to and support me when I’m stressed or upset. All of these habits are intimately linked to masculinity.

We aren’t hurting anyone when we hate men. And, for that matter, we don’t really hate them, because we’ve all got boyfriends, brothers, fathers, sons, colleagues and friends whom we like and love.

Anger at being treated as an inferior is not remotely comparable to the violence committed by the men who humiliate, rape and kill us, or even the violence committed by the men who ignore us, turn their backs on us and mock us. We have everything to gain by distancing ourselves from the limited role of the patient, gentle, almost passive woman, and insisting that men make the effort to become better people.